Sucker Punch: A mad, mad world

When you watch this movie, be prepared to feel your skin crawl and be disturbed, be very disturbed.

Sucker Punch isn’t what you think it is. It isn’t a bad-girls-gone-wild-and-kicking-ass-in-mini-skirts romp, and it most definitely isn’t a feel-good film. In fact, it’s a feel-bad film, especially if you are a man.

Cinema is a language and the film director is the creator of the system of symbols, images, text and context that makes the language unique to the film. In Sucker Punch, director Zack Snyder, who also co-wrote the script along with Steve Shibuya has crafted a fully formed and distinctive language, utilising an extended dream conceit effectively and powerfully to create a very female internal world where all the latent fears, anxieties, passions and strengths of a woman come into play. The same characters appear over and over, in different variations, which fulfills the dream ‘code’ as it were of the film. For those critics who talk of its flawed logic, the flaw is in misunderstanding the carefully crafted logic of the film.

A literal understanding of the film won’t do you much good. Essentially, it is a story of the triumph of a woman over the demons both inside and outside who may seek to harm her. Focusing on the fantasies of Babydoll (Emily Browning) whose father has institutionalized her in a mental asylum, it’s a great film for a woman feeling powerless in any type of hell. It almost places you inside a psychological dreamscape in which you can live out fantasies of revenge. In this way, the film becomes something akin to a video game at times, which is possible because the non-linearity is seamless, and the visual effects dramatic and aimed at full immersion.

What is equally effective is the feeling of being trapped inside a woman’s head, where absolutely nothing will get in her way. Men, monsters, robots, dragons, men who are monsters, all are vanquished in a quest for freedom. This is a study in dissociation, which occurs as a response to trauma and allows the mind to distance itself from experiences that are too much for the psyche to process at that time. For this reason, there is some real discomfort here with the horror of rape and abuse ever-looming. There is only one male character portrayed in a positive light, which is why it is unlikely that a ‘man’s man,’ would find this film watchable, and because it is such a strong statement it would be totally inappropriate for any man to make any comment about the physical attributes of the female characters in this film, and they are a-plenty.

The soundtrack is potent and contributes greatly to the sinister, menacing tone of the film, but also to the strength of the female voice that comes out here. Many of the songs are remakes of older, well-known tracks from the 80’s and 90’s and almost exclusively sung by women. Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) will never sound the same again. The reworking of the Pixies classic Where is My Mind? was particularly poignant.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, May 8^th, 2011.